


No Fixed Address

by levitatethis



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: Community: hardtime100, M/M, Prompt Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-25
Updated: 2010-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:06:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levitatethis/pseuds/levitatethis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keller's life changes direction, time and time again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Fixed Address

**Author's Note:**

> written for hardtime100 flashfic challenge #57: Cha-cha-cha-changes!

In the end the mistakes are mine and mine alone…so are the victories.

 _Baby, this town rips the bones from your back ~~ It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap ~~ We gotta get out while we’re young ~~ ‘cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run_   
**-Bruce Springsteen, _Born to Run_ **

I’m sixteen and the world may not be my oyster, but I take what I can get and do my best to tip the balance in my favour.

Odd jobs are a dime a dozen. Acquaintances are the same. I can count my friends on one hand, but who needs that when I’m tweaking in Billy’s basement or jumping into a fight for no other reason than to feel the fucking _thrill_ of it. In this life, people have your back for the most simple and selfish of reasons—because you’re their ride home or they’re owed cash and you still need to ante up. Someone’s always collecting. There’s no room for getting sentimental.

Sex is a means to an end—the end being a much needed blue balls or bust release. That in itself means sex is a loose term. Getting off doesn’t require the goddamn missionary position, and though it’s mostly women I’ve been with (clenching around my fingers, thrusting their wet pussies in time with my tongue, swallowing me whole), I’m not exclusive. Sometimes what I want is the hint of stubble across a cheek and the tight lines of well defined biceps, the growing bulge pressed in tight jeans and that length in my hand, hard and straining; the taste of my own cum mixed with another’s. There’s no rhyme or reason, just the thrum of arousal coursing through my body.

I live in the here and now.

I’m young and I’m wise.

But it doesn’t mean I can see the fork in the road coming up just over a year from now. I can’t begin to grasp how monumentally my life is about to change. I don’t see the pain (the learned lesson that sex is a commodity) and choices (tow a bullshit line so you don’t have to look over your shoulder and if that means sucking Aryan cock until you prove yourself better as a fighter—though still subjugated—so be it).

And I sure as hell don’t see the love (“I missed you”… “Me too”).

It’s all out there, just waiting.

But I’m too young and too fucking blind.

 _I feel just like I’m sinking ~~ And I claw for solid ground ~~ I’m pulled down by the undertow ~~ I never thought I could feel so low ~~ Oh darkness, I feel like letting go ~~ If all of the strength and all of the courage ~~ Come and lift me from this place ~~ I know I can love you much better than this ~~ Full of grace ~~ My love  
_ **-Sarah McLachlan,** _ **Full of Grace** _

I’m damaged goods.

I’m a two-bit con going on life, with a joke of a possibility for parole when I’ll be too old to give a shit anymore.

I’m a lump of coal on Christmas Day, retribution for the misguided anticipation of others.

I turned by back on the one truly good thing seen fit to enter my life and all for what? A called in favour I thought I’d paid in full years before; a false pretense of protection. And all it cost me was _him_.

Tobias.

The perfect mark. Self-loathing, alcoholic, over-privileged, looking to be punished and desperate to be saved.

Toby.

Indestructible.

To-bee.

He didn’t know the _real_ me, but saw the sum of my parts and looked at me as though I was worth existing in this world, as if I was something special only he was privy to. One kiss beneath a white lie mistletoe and still I could bullshit myself as good as I fed it to others. I’ve done my penance, but he wants a pound of flesh. I’ve twisted myself inside out for the long shot glimmer of possibility because my lot in life tells me I’m never going to get it.

Glutton for punishment?

Hey man, it’s a hard knock life and I want something more. It shouldn’t exist in this place, but it does. Right now it’s just beyond my fingertips, a breath away, and I can practically taste it.

I don’t crawl for anyone, but for Toby I’ve kneeled. He’s the asshole who made me believe and now I can’t stop.

“Undeserving (little prick),” I can hear Father Callaghan muttering as my thirteen-year-old self confesses then smirks a few days later during mass.

The truth, however, is this. Toby isn’t so clean either. He’s broken, like me. White collar, blue collar—they’re only superficial categories that reveal nothing of importance. The sooner he realizes we’re not so different (and it goes far beyond Vern breaking me in at Lardner and then doing the same to Toby in Oz—though that connection is a sore point at best—you can actually draw the line between bullshit life trajectories while playing, ‘Let’s Make A Deal.’), the sooner he realizes that love isn’t an empty word etched in candy hearts for the oblivious masses—

“Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year.”

Well look at that. Breakthrough.

  
 _  
When there's no way out, the only way out is to give in ~~ How I love to...give in_   
**-Metric,** **Empty**

Rule #1 of a good con: Never let it get personal.

The problem with rules is I’ve made a living breaking them and now it’s biting me in the ass. I’ve tasted the promised land, felt the shocking warmth of someone loving me fully and completely; felt the beautiful ache of loving someone so much it hurts to look at him too long, lest nagging doubts start to pick at the seams, because if it’s too good to be true…

In return my heart’s been ripped in half, stomped to pieces and handed back to me, battered and bruised.

Yet the more I push Toby away to make him suffer for what he’s done (and he’s definitely suffering, that self righteous prick thinking I could do something so hateful to his kids. _His kids_. I’m so pissed I can’t be bothered to care about it being ‘the grief speaking’), the stronger I feel him. He’s under my skin, in my blood. Fighting the invasion, the _occupation_ , is futile.

I give myself permission to remember, instead. After all, if the bulk of my life is going to be in this Hellhole, the next few years of which he’ll be only a handful of feet away, I might as well enjoy it. Torturing him is only part of it.

Memories…

I love Toby acting all put out, a heartbeat away from huffing embarrassingly about public displays of affection, trying to maintain a modicum of unruffled modesty despite my hands touching, cupping, stroking him in plain view.

I love him below me, legs wrapped around my hips as I thrust inside him; his hands on my waist (bruising the skin), moving up to my shoulders and neck; his mouth parted (tongue peeking out); pupils blown wide, neck stretched and lean, grunts and moans punctuating the practiced silence; looking all together debauched. I stroke him in tandem until he’s spilling between us, the added stickiness gluing our chests together only spurs me to pound harder until I’m coming hard, groaning against his lips.

This is what I (me and only me) have reduced him to. This is what I’m capable of. Strip away the country club connections and name brand expectations, toss the university degree out the window, pour the poor little rich boy another martini or a shot of grade-A moonshine and rip the wizard’s curtain to the floor.

He’s fallible, pliable.

A miserable little cunt.

 _The keeper of my soul._

My bitch.

 _Love of my fucking life._

He’s been testing me, flaunting how far he can pull away and fit someone else into my place (if only for a minute or two), but I’m the one giving the final exam and he knows it now. We both know how this ends. Sister Pete would say I’m “succumbing to base instincts.” Bottom line is, I’m a survivalist.

I want, can’t have—so no one else can either.

 _Maybe our relationship ~~ Isn’t as crazy as it seems ~~ Maybe that’s what happens ~~ When a tornado meets a volcano ~~ All I know is ~~ I love you too much  
_ **-Eminem featuring Rihanna,** _**Love The Way You Lie** _

I have loved.

Against all odds and theories of probability, I found it…or it found me. There but for the grace of God and all the psychobabble in the world couldn’t mount a united front to stop me.

I loved so much that even my broken heart nourished and sustained me; so much that despite furious anger, I never hated Toby, not one hundred percent, not so much that the need to see him or breathe him in as I walked by didn’t trump the hurt.

I have loved and lost.

The problem with obsession is it’s all encompassing. I should have let Toby go, for both our sakes, but who’s kidding whom? We’re an elastic band (addicts, the both of us; different drugs of choice…if there even is a choice)—stretched apart far enough before we _have_ to snap back, sharply, painfully. Deep down inside Toby couldn’t leave well enough alone, just like I couldn’t stand him out there. Should I have thought about his kids? Of course, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Besides, where the fuck was all his concern about his kids when he broke his parole?

Sister Pete can glare all she wants and point her finger, whining about me manipulating Toby and destroying his life. What she doesn’t say, however, is that Toby made his own choices and he’s never been one to find contentment with what he’s got. Once an addict, always an addict; always jonesing for something more, forgetting to see the forest for the trees. I know that better than anyone. I know him better than anyone. Maybe he wanted to punish himself for leaving me behind? Maybe he thought he didn’t deserve to be a present, hands-on, honest-to-goodness PTA attending dad to his kids, not after doing it from afar for so long? Maybe love _is_ blind and he convinced himself I wouldn’t try to fuck up his parole to get him back? Maybe he knew that I knew he would do it and that’s why he was so pissed—we’re both dancing to a pied piper’s tune.

I have lost.

There are no happy endings, it’s just murder and mayhem, shanks and ladders, cut short confessions and self imposed restraining orders, swan dives and unsaid goodbyes that provide no closure while leaving everyone in a state of limbo.

“Don’t let go,” I said to him once, yet he did. Now I’ve done the same, but I get it. Letting go isn’t about not caring or being indifferent. It’s about loving so much it either clouds your judgment beyond reason or allows only one way to show someone how much you believe in them, want for him.

The only way I could give Toby what he wanted and deserved…

Don’t let anyone tell him I never cared. It was him and only him, from the beginning to the end, alpha and omega in a two by two pod.

I’ve lost, but I’ve also loved.

Me. Christopher Keller. Six, seven years ago, I would have thought that was a joke in itself, no disrespect to Kitty, Angelique and Bonnie. Fact is, guys like me aren’t loved—not truly—and we certainly don’t fall in love (lust, yes, love, not so much). Apparently I’m a man of contradictions. In life I was death. In death I live forever in a select, protected corner of Toby’s mind.

Say what you will, but in the end we collided as the fates decreed it. Fuck the false prophets spouting sentimental drivel and self-serving concern; what do they know? They think of love as some sort of enchanted perfection, a poem or a sonnet. They don’t want to see the blood and guts at its center, the lies told out of desperate hope, the sacrifices demanded. They choose to ignore the tears and destruction in favour of smiles exchanged across a table, the pressure of two bodies laying together on the bottom bunk, heads bowed as joking words, words of affection, contemplative words are quietly spoken. They sidestep the obscenities for moments of kindness, refusing to acknowledge that one reality cannot exist without the other.

I see it all now, clear as day.

I killed for him and died for him. Can anyone really grasp the depth of that? To have one person invoke such a proclamation upon the world is a goddamn miracle. It does not happen to everyone. If I heard this same story when I was a kid I would have rolled my eyes at another half-ass fool on the hill.

Turns out there’s nothing foolish about this.

I loved Toby. Still do. And he loves me. Together or not, in one world or the next, we’re an indisputable fact.

And ain’t no one going to take that away from me.  
 


End file.
